“Russia has DEFEATED NATO Sanctions Thanks to De-Dollarization w/ Garland Nixon”, Feb 19, 2023, The Left Lens with Danny Haiphong, Interview of Garland Nixon, by Danny Haiphong, discussing events in Ukraine, Europe, the U.S. and the Global South, duration of interview 29:05, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a7wgtahJZE >. Note: This is a video presentation of a discussion there is no transcript nor any text.
“Hope strategy at Munich Security Conference, The Duran Podcast”, Feb 17, 2023, Alexander Mercouris & Alex Christoforou, The Duran Podcast, Apple Podcasts, at <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hope-strategy-at-munich-security-conference/id1442883993?i=1000600259315>. Note: This is a video presentation of a discussion there is no transcript nor any text.
Iran-China Strategic Partnership: The Big Picture, Feb 18, 2023, Pepe Escobar, Dissident Voice, at < https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/02/iran-china-strategic-partnership/ >
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: This set of one discussion/interview from The Left Lens, “Russia has DEFEATED NATO Sanctions Thanks to De-Dollarization w/ Garland Nixon”, one episode of the ongoing show on The Duran, “Hope strategy at Munich Security Conference, The Duran Podcast”, and an article by Pepe Escobar, “Iran-China Strategic Partnership: The Big Picture”, are presented here as something of an alternative point of view. This is necessary in the face of what seems to be the largest Propaganda and Disinformation effort by the U.S. / NATO militarists, loyal servants of the ruling class, in their 74-year history. The Corporate Controlled Media, and even some of the more gullible elements of the so-called alternative media, are presenting the visit of President Biden to Ukraine and Poland as a triumphal event; featuring the visit of a great Caesar. In fact as I write this Biden is exiting the Presidential Limousine at some official building in Warsaw where the ultra-reactionary members of the Polish Political class are lined up to greet him (looking much like the servants lined up to greet some arriving aristocrat in a Downton Abbey episode).
Biden, in a ceremony that is largely aimed at the increasingly skeptical U.S. populace, has walked up and down reviewing the troops of the Polish Honor Guard, is now watching the honor guard march away from the official balcony, and will no doubt give some sort of speech. Yesterday, he walked the streets of the Government Headquarters area in Kiev, Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, was on his best behavior and not loudly demanding huge amounts of advanced weaponry, while he gave Biden the grand tour of that district.
The reality on which the posturing and pontification are based is, however, much less favorable. Any honest assessment of what has taken place in Ukraine over either the past year since the Russian invasion, or more realistically over the 9 years since the U.S. sponsored and assisted Fascist Coup in 2014, shows wins and losses on both sides. The U.S. / NATO have greatly aided the Ukrainian military effort. The U.S. / NATO supplied large amounts of military hardware, advisors, and after a false start with incompetent foreign volunteers, have now committed the main force of Imperialist Mercenaries to the Ukraine. They consist of some 20,000+ hardened paid thugs who appeared over the years in places like Angola, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya. This effort provided the needed muscle to stop the original Russian plan for a low-impact military campaign. In contrast the economic campaign against Russia has been a nearly complete flop. There are plenty of markets for Russian oil and gas in Asia, and between domestic production and imports from Asian sources, the Russians have largely avoided the hoped for collapse of the Russian Economy; that was so eagerly predicted by the propagandists in the West.
Garland Nixon points out that the West, greatly weakened by 40+ years of deindustrialization, no longer has the industrial and technological muscle to win this ongoing confrontation with Russia. A confrontation that features various levels of assistance from China, Iran, and even India and other Brics-type nations. The economic power of the U.S. is significantly exaggerated by the way that GNP is determined, while that of Russia and China is seriously underestimated. The many predatory and malignant practices of U.S. capitalists are added to the GNP of the U.S., while China and Russia that do, of course, have their own problems with negative behaviors among their elites, do have much less of those sorts of issues. In reality China was already the largest economy on Earth and Russia was the 6th largest in 2018 rankings that include: 1). China {$25.36 Trillion}; 2). The U.S. {$20.49 Trillion}; 3). India {$10.5 Trillion}; 4). Japan {$5.48 Trillion}; 5). Germany {$4.5 Trillion}; and 6). Russia {$3.99 Trillion}. There are also several countries with PPP GDPs over $2 Trillion, that were including in descending order Indonesia {$3.49 Trillion}, Brazil {$3.37 Trillion}, France and The U.K. { tied at $3.07 Trillion}, Italy {$2.54 Trillion}, Mexico {$2.52 Trillion}, Turkey {$2.37 Trillion}, and South Korea {$2.09 Trillion}. A couple of graphics demonstrate these relationships very clearly. Figure 1 shows the situation in 2018 and there can be no doubt that the PPP GDP figures for the U.S. and other NATO nations have declined while those for China and other BRICS countries have increased.
Figure 2 demonstrates the situation for 2018 using the standard World Bank GDP figures. According to the standard GDP figures, the U.S. was still a larger economy than China, that was only 66.4% as large as the U.S. economy in 2018. And furthermore, as Garland Nixon in the interview posted here, as well a economists including Michael Hudson, Jack Rasmus, and Richard Wolff have all pointed out using a variety of measures and reasoning, the real size of the U.S. economy in 2018 was certainly significantly below the $20.49 Trillion shown in these graphics. At least 15% should be subtracted to account for the extremely expensive and dysfunctional for-profit U.S. healthcare system and the rapacious other operations by U.S. Capitalists. For just one example, BlackRock Financial used the legal system and a breathtaking level of fraud to foreclose on several million U.S. homes and to transform the homeowners into renters. Black Rock is also active in the privatization of the famous Black Earth Farmland of Ukraine. Subtracting 15% from U.S. GDP in the PPP figures we can see that the U.S. figure declines to $17.42 Trillion, or 68.7% the size of China’s GDP. Of course the per capita GDP even in the PPP figures is still much higher in the U.S., but that differential has narrowed significantly.
The realities of the Ukraine War look very different from the triumphalist vision that is peddled by the Corporate Controlled Media and much of the so-called Alternative Media. These audio/video presentations are sobering for Americans. I think it is worth noting that Pepe Escobar takes a view of Iran that ignores the harsh aspects of the Islamic State. But that hardline regime was caused, in part, by the 1953 Coup that the U.S. sponsored, the first major such accomplishment by the CIA. The last 8 short paragraphs of Escobar’s article are particularly pertinent to the discussion at hand. This includes the proclivity of the U.S. / NATO leadership to be willing to fight this war out “to the last Ukrainian”.
There are other considerations. The U.S. remains very powerful and about 60% of global reserves are still held in dollars. That does not include the huge amount of cash held in dollars, primarily in $100 bills around the world. But the reality is that the dollar has suffered from truly stunning loss of value, having fallen to around 1% of its value in 1913. This is shown graphically by Figure 3 below:
Links and text for the 3 items included in this post are available here below:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
“Russia has DEFEATED NATO Sanctions Thanks to De-Dollarization w/ Garland Nixon”, Feb 19, 2023, The Left Lens with Danny Haiphong, Interview of Garland Nixon, by Danny Haiphong, discussing events in Ukraine, Europe, the U.S. and the Global South, duration of interview 29:05, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a7wgtahJZE >. Note: This is a video presentation of a discussion there is no transcript nor any text.
“Hope strategy at Munich Security Conference, The Duran Podcast”, Feb 17, 2023, Alexander Mercouris & Alex Christoforou, The Duran Podcast, Apple Podcasts, duration of discussion 39:14, at <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hope-strategy-at-munich-security-conference/id1442883993?i=1000600259315>. Note: This is a video presentation of a discussion there is no transcript nor any text.
“Iran-China Strategic Partnership: The Big Picture”, Feb 18, 2023, Pepe Escobar, Dissident Voice, at < https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/02/iran-china-strategic-partnership/ >.
Text of Escobar Article Below:
{Caption: The national flags of China and Iran fly in Tiananmen Square during Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi’s visit to Beijing, China, February 14, 2023. (Photo by Reuters) }
The key takeaway of President Ebrahim Raeisi’s state visit to Beijing goes way beyond the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements.
This is a crucial inflexion point in an absorbing, complex, decades-long, ongoing historical process: Eurasia integration.
Little wonder that President Raeisi, welcomed by a standing ovation at Peking University before receiving an honorary academic title, stressed “a new world order is forming and taking the place of the older one”, characterized by “real multilateralism, maximum synergy, solidarity and dissociation from unilateralisms”.
And the epicenter of the new world order, he asserted, is Asia.
It was quite heartening to see the Iranian president eulogizing the Ancient Silk Road, not only in terms of trade but also as a “cultural bond” and “connecting different societies together throughout history”.
Raeisi could have been talking about Sassanid Persia, whose empire ranged from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, and was the great intermediary Silk Road trading power for centuries between China and Europe.
It’s as if he was corroborating Chinese President Xi Jinping’s famed notion of “people to people exchanges” applied to the New Silk Roads.
And then President Raeisi jump cut to the inescapable historical connection: he addressed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), of which Iran is a key partner.
All that spells out Iran’s full reconnection with Asia – after those arguably wasted years of trying an entente cordiale with the collective West. That was symbolized by the fate of the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal: negotiated, unilaterally buried and then, last year, all but condemned all over gain.
A case can be made that after the Islamic Revolution 44 years ago, a budding “pivot to the East” always lurked behind the official government strategy of “Neither East nor West”.
Starting in the 1990s that happened to progressively enter in full synch with China’s official “Open Door” policy.
After the start of the millennium, Beijing and Tehran have been getting even deeper in synch. BRI, the major geopolitical and geoeconomic breakthrough, was proposed in 2013, in Central Asia and Southeast Asia.
Then, in 2016, President Xi visited Iran, in West Asia, leading to the signing of several memoranda of understanding (MOU), and recently the wide-ranging 25-year comprehensive strategic agreement – consolidating Iran as a key BRI actor.
Accelerating all key vectors
In practice, Raeisi’s visit to Beijing was framed to accelerate all manner of vectors in Iran-China economic cooperation – from crucial investments in the energy sector (oil, gas, petrochemical industry, pipelines) to banking, with Beijing engaged in advancing modernizing reforms in Iran’s banking sector and Chinese banks opening branches across Iran.
Chinese companies may be about to enter the emerging Iranian commercial and private real estate markets, and will be investing in advanced technology, robotics and AI across the industrial spectrum.
Sophisticated strategies to bypass harsh, unilateral US sanctions will be a major focus every step of the way in Iran-China relations. Barter is certainly part of the picture when it comes to trading Iranian oil/gas contracts for Chinese industrial and infrastructure deals.
It’s quite possible that Iran’s sovereign wealth fund – the National Development Fund of Iran – with holdings at estimated $90 billion, may be able to finance strategic industrial and infrastructure projects.
Other international financial partners may come in the form of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB) and the NDB – the BRICS bank, as soon as Iran is accepted as a member of BRICS+: that may be decided this coming August at the summit in South Africa.
The heart of the matter of the strategic partnership is energy. The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) pulled out of a deal to develop Phase 11 of Iran’s South Pars gas field, adjacent to Qatar’s section.
Yet CNPC can always come back for other projects. Phase 11 is currently being developed by the Iranian energy company Petropars.
Energy deals – oil, gas, petrochemical industry, renewables – will boom across what I dubbed Pipelineistan in the early 2000s.
Chinese companies will certainly be part of new oil and gas pipelines connecting to the existing Iranian pipeline networks and configuring new pipeline corridors.
Already established Pipelineistan includes the Central Asia-China pipeline, which connects to China’s West-East pipeline grid, nearly 7,000 km from Turkmenistan to the eastern China seaboard; and the Tabriz-Ankara pipeline (2,577 km, from northwest Iran to the Turkish capital).
Then there’s one of the great sagas of Pipelineistan: the IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline, previously known as the Peace Pipeline, from South Pars to Karachi.
The Americans did everything in the book – and off the books – to stall it, delay it or even kill it. But IP refused to die; and the China-Iran strategic partnership could finally make it happen.
A new geostrategic architecture
Arguably, the central node of the China-Iran strategic partnership is the configuration of a complex geostrategic economic architecture: connecting the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship of BRI, to a two-pronged Iran-centered corridor.
This will take the form of a China-Afghanistan-Iran corridor and a China-Central Asia-Iran corridor, thus forming what we may call a geostrategic China-Iran Economic Corridor.
Beijing and Tehran, now on overdrive and with no time to lose, may face all manner of challenges – and threats – from the Hegemon; but their 25-year strategic deal does honor historically powerful trading/ merchant civilizations now equipped with substantial manufacturing/ industrial bases and with a serious tradition in advanced scientific innovation.
The serious possibility of China-Iran finally configuring what will be a brand new, expanded strategic economic space, from East Asia to West Asia, central to 21st century multipolarity, is a geopolitical tour de force.
Not only that will completely nullify the US sanction obsession; it will direct Iran’s next stages of much needed economic development to the East, and it will boost the whole geoeconomic space from China to Iran and everyone in between.
This whole process – already happening – is in many aspects a direct consequence of the Empire’s “until the last Ukrainian” proxy war against Russia.
Ukraine as cannon fodder is rooted in Mackinder’s heartland theory: world control belongs to the nation that controls the Eurasian land mass.
This was behind World War I, where Germany knocking out Russia created fear among the Anglo-Saxons that should Germany knock out France it would control the Eurasian land mass.
WWII was conceived against Germany and Japan forming an axis to control Europe, Russia and China.
The present, potential WWIII was conceived by the Hegemon to break a friendly alliance between Germany, Russia and China – with Iran as a privileged West Asia partner.
Everything we are witnessing at this stage spells out the US trying to break up Eurasia integration.
So it’s no wonder that the three top existential “threats” to the American oligarchy which dictates the “rules-based international order” are The Three Sovereigns: China, Russia and Iran.
Does that matter? Not really. We have just seen that while the dogs (of war) bark, the Iran-China strategic caravan rolls on.
First published at Press TV.
No comments:
Post a Comment